Planeteer Fail

Obviously with the world seemingly coming to an inescapable end at the hands of climate change in the near future – even Stephen Hawking thinks we should bail ship – every company and their tail wagging subsidiaries are trying to seem more earth friendly. NBC does its green week, toilet paper comes recycled and this past week our Shopper’s Drug Mart started charging five cents per bag. Obviously they are not the first business to try these shenanigans in an attempt to appear more environmentally conscious. Superstore has been doing it for years. It was the rest of the transaction that made me laugh out loud.

Being the well known Planeteer that I am, I turned down the bag at the check out counter – save a plastic tree when you can right – but then I was handed a 3″x3″ cardboard ticket and was wished “good luck”. That is right: Shoppers Drug Mart would be horrified to give you a free flimsy plastic bag to carry your recently purchased items in and as such will charge a five cent per bag “sin tax” to make up their financial shortfall in a recession, but they have no problem in handing out cardboard instant win tickets – which we all know no one ever wins on – to every customer that comes through the doors. Using a plastic bag that I will reuse at home is an evil to be discouraged five cents at a time, but deforesting South America to print lottery tickets in perfectly acceptable apparently. The real kicker is that the prize being offered if someone were to win was a greenhouse gas factory . . . yup . . . a car.

I am all for being environmentally conscious, but please, can we all just agree to be at least a little bit consistent on this? If only Alanis Morrisette had released “Jagged Little Pill” fifteen years later this could have been the second verse on her hit single.